The GOP's Non-Existent Space Policy

NASA seems to be one Big Government program many Republicans love. The GOP platform criticizes the federal government as “bloated, antiquated and unresponsive to taxpayers” but has nothing but hackneyed praise for NASA, and doesn’t even mention the increasing role of the private sector. The authors of this platform must imagine they still live in the Cold War of the 1960s, when only governments launched payloads and people into space.

The platform committee declares it “isn’t enough to merely downsize government, having a smaller version of the same failed systems,” that we need to “do things in a dramatically different way” — yet says nothing about the need to reform NASA or to streamline regulation of the emerging NewSpace sector. Republicans call themselves the Great Opportunity Party. Yet their Platform presumes “space” is a (government) program, instead of a frontier to be opened to the American people – the greatest “opportunity” since the West was settled.

In the last eight years, the private space industry has taken off — literally. Companies like SpaceX and Sierra Nevada are vying to take crew and cargo to the International Space Station. Others are testing vehicles for suborbital space tourism, or planning orbiting space facilities and asteroid mining. Many inside NASA recognize that the agency should be encouraging these NewSpace companies by buying their services, rather than competing with them, so NASA can focus on true exploration–like Lewis and Clark. NASA needs the kind of overhaul Gov. Romney has brought to other dysfunctional organizations if it is to pass his test for all government programs: is it worth borrowing money from China to pay for it? Only when NASA ceases to be a white-collar jobs program and starts nurturing entrepreneurs in new industries will the answer be yes.

A few months ago, when he was using the issue to bash Newt Gingrich for his vision with respect to the next frontier, I had some questions for Mitt Romney (which he has never thought worth answering). Presuming that the Republican platform plank on space will be adopted as his own, I now have some new ones.

1. As president, will you aggressively support NASA's Commercial Crew Program to minimize the time during which we are reliant on Putin’s Russia to get our astronauts to the space station?

2. Former NASA administrator Mike Griffin is supposedly on your team of advisers for space policy. During the debates, you said that if anyone proposed building a lunar base, you would “fire them.” Griffin’s policy and plans were to do exactly that. When are you going to fire him?

3. Have you or your campaign staff read the Augustine Committee report from 2009, which explains why the Mike Griffin approach is unaffordable and unsustainable? Are you aware that, despite this, Congress has chosen to continue it under a different name, on a bipartisan basis, wasting billions of dollars of taxpayer money on rockets that NASA doesn’t need for space exploration just to maintain jobs in their states and districts?

4. Do you believe that NASA, as it evolved during the Cold War and as currently constituted, is the best federal instrument to advance our civil space goals, or do you think that, half a century after the first American in space, it’s past time for a major overhaul of federal space policy?

5. At Bain Capital, you were a champion of Schumpeter’s concept of “creative destruction,” a redeployment of resources from value-subtracting activities to value-adding ones. Have you considered the degree to which our space policy is ripe for such an approach, particularly given the nation’s fiscal straits?

Finally, do you believe, as implied by the platform, that the the purpose of space activities is for “exploration,” or do you think that exploration is merely a means to an end — space development? As a bonus question, have you considered the possibility that, as Utah was for your ancestors, space could ultimately be a new frontier offering religious and other freedom, and a last resort should the Founders’ noble experiment fail here on earth?